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And yet, looking at this phenomenal waste of resources, tech bros took a good hard look at it and said ‘Hold my beer’ - and made LLMs.
Theoronic fingers that satoshi nakamoto actually developed bitcoin as a proof of concept, not as a full payment system.
sigh
Once again:
Blockchain is not synonymous with cryptomining
Blockchain does not require proof of work
Cryptocurrency and NFT grifting does not devalue blockchain as an immutable distributed ledger
I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding
Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain… then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own “consensus”.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp
and most use cases around things like “smart contracts” end up still requiring a trusted third party at some point
https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/
True… But Satoshi did invent Bitcoin, which is proof of work, and is everything in OP
Elon musk made the electric car.
It had dumb handles that killed people. It lied about having self-driving capabilities. It had terrible manufacturing tolerances.
The “technically true” nature of it reads like propaganda against electric cars as a whole, does it not? I’d argue that applies here too.
“Popularized” the electric car, maybe?
There were electric cars since there were cars
Fair enough, I forgot that OP said “blockchain,” instead of “bitcoin.”
I really really really doubt those claims. I would need sources to believe that and also the blockchain itself is not a bad idea. Theres also like a thousand different implementations of it. Its like saying every form of currencies are bad.
What, why would you doubt such obvious claims such as “the blockchain […] weights 60 000 tons”
I seriously would like to know WTF the poster meant by that
I thought the context was obvious - in server hardware and infrastructure required to house it.
Verifying this number thought seems essentially impossible.
Yeah but without anonymous payments (xmr) there’s no good way to easily pay for diy estrogen or hosting for piracy services, or to anonymously pay my mullvad account.
Granted if society wherent setup as a giant fucking fascist capitalistic panopticon we wouldn’t really need any of that.
Any who, I mostly agree with the sentiment though. “Career” investors and venture capitalists belong against a fucking wall IMO.
I don’t know what a mullvad is, but now I want one. I HAVE CASH
You do know that you can pay for mullvad in cash?
You can send cash in an envelope to them with your mullvad ID and they will credit your account.
Let’s be realistic, that isn’t an equivalent alternative
Sending mail is pseudo-anonymous at best. It’s exceptionally slow. Most importantly, it’s insecure to the point where most postal services explicitly recommend against mailing cash
Can I go to their HQ, slip them a tenner with my ID on a piece of paper under the door?
Yes
How do you anonymously pay for things when the ledger is public?
That’s literally what caused bitcoin mixer services to exist where you throw some amount of BTC in an account with them, tell them how much you want paid to whom, and then it takes all the transactions for a certain (usually random) time period and plays a shell game with them, passing funds from account to account in various amounts and resulting ultimately in the right amount going from you to the target via multiple intermediaries. Slow because it involves a lot of transactions, but the idea was to make it hard to trace exactly who was paying who, beyond being able to know that one or more of the user accounts were paying some amount to one or more of the destination accounts.
Over the last 5 years or so, law enforcement has been shutting down several such organizations for money laundering, being illegal money transmitting businesses or things along those lines as appropriate to the jurisdiction.
Even without them, with good opsec it can be hard to tie a BTC wallet address to a human person, which is the point of anonymous payment.
The ledger being public doesn’t necessarily mean anyone knows who “13LPtD4GG1XX7fgrze6xMR5V284rRQg9jv” is. But yeah, you can of course track the movement of funds, and make educated guesses on which addresses belong to who.
Which is pseudonymous, and not anonymous. Unless we are talking about monero of course.
Okay, that’s probably a fair distinction. Don’t know enough about anonymous vs pseudonymous to disagree.
“pseudonymous” is a portmanteau (or malamanteau, depending on your opinions) of “pseudo” or “seeming like” and “anonymous”, meaning “seems like anonymity (but isn’t)”.
In a pseudonymous system, it might be hard to confirm identity, but it’s possible. In an anonymous system, it’s impossible to confirm identity.
Additionally, you can use a coin tumbler (I think that’s the term) where a bunch of strangers pool their coins for various transactions into one wallet that then distributes the coins to their end destinations, adding a layer of obscurity for which starting wallets are associated with which ending wallets.
XMR uses some really cool cryptography actually. Zero-knowledge proofs and shit.
xmr is a cryptocurrency which aims to make reading transactions from the chain impossible. Iirc the main mechanism of this is that they bundle a lot of transactions together and send out coins from that pool only once it is large enough, without preserving each specific coin. This repeats for a few proxies. You could trace a coin from origin to endpoint, but this would be pretty much useless as you cannot know whether the endpoint was the intended one or not.
With monero the ledger is encrypted and has a bunch of obfuscated/fake data in it
If you bought crypto, same way money laundering works. Otherwise you can earn crypto while remaining anonymous (but in the case of a VPN, connecting to it from your home IP after anonymously buying it kind of defeats the purpose [partially])
If you are buying online it will track back to you through the payment method. If you buy in a physical location, you give an important clue to where you live. If a state actor wants to deanonymize you, it’s only a matter of how many resources they are willing to spend on it.
Say you buy $50 worth, which isn’t anonymous. Then you add to a pool of several thousand or more, which is then sent out to several clean anonymous wallets as smaller fractions of the whole minus some fee. It’s not rocket surgery but works effectively well so long as you have good opsec and the pool is trustworthy.
The wallet you sent $50 from is known, but which of the hundreds of wallets that got $10 from the pool belong to you vs others in the pool? They can deduce it from patterns and usage, but it makes it a lot harder. And this is just “newbie’s first introduction to anonimized finances”
But unlike cash, the chain exists forever. They can do wild sorts of analysis, which means you need good opsec with clean separation, and lots of obfuscation. But this is nothing new to people in that world.
So yes, it can be anonymous, but it’s tricky and may not always be because it has a permanent public record.
… But if you go thru all that trouble and then just connect to your new shiny dark VPN from your home PC… Uhh… It’s like ordering pizza delivery. Maybe not the best usecase for ‘untraceable currency’
If a state actor wants to deanonymize you…
Then there ain’t fucking shit you can do about it. The only thing you can do to keep big brother off your back is to be too small of a fish for them to spend their time on.
Okay, politely, fuck off. Its 2026 and I absolutely refuse to believe anyone educated on crypto enough to know what a blockchain is and how it works, even if just a basic understanding, doesn’t know about encrypted blockchains or XMR.
You get to post this comment like once in your life, and after that we both know its in bad faith. I really doubt its the first time.
Zcash has opt in anonymization. So it really doesn’t work because any offramp can just not accept any zcash that has been obfuscated. With monero, its all obfuscated by default.
If a diy hrt seller doesn’t accept obfuscated cash they are 100% a fed, but point taken
I’m not sure I’d trust whatever that link is as a source that XMR isn’t secure… I mean, what even is that link?
Admittedly I’m not a hardcore crytography nerd, but I know they’ve been improving things for years, and that message on that mailing list looked like it was 10 years old.
Not saying your wrong, but Id take it with a grain of salt. Anytime I see a newer encrypted block chain I see it and think whatever improvements have been done here, will eventually bleed into monero because of that. And that unlike the other encrypted blockchain, people will still actively be using xmr for real transactions.
You might be right, I have not followed xmr closely. You might also notice that this vulnerability is unlikely to deanonimise you, but the point was more that it is a mistake they shouldn’t have made. Their last audit looks fine, though it was made by a blockchain auditing company which I don’t know. I don’t think there is much harm in using xmr for this, groups who would be capable of exploiting vulnerabilities in this kind of project are unlikely to do so, unless an issue of national security becomes associated somehow
also no delivery drugs. people would have to go out to get their drugs
Send it to zero with my by ignoring it like I do and bellowing with gales of laughter in the faces of it’s advocates.
I’m not sure how much of this is accurate, but I have to agree it’s been a bane to humankind. Maybe, just maybe, we should learn to stop, pull our heads out of our asses and think very carefully about potential consequences before we do things.
Does anyone know I’d proof of stake ended up being better than proof of work? I dont follow crypto but kept hearing that was supposed to improve things
Crypto is a big deal because it enables grifting and crime, but with how shit payment processors are and their tendency to use their position for censorship, crypto actually would be a potential way of solving that problem IF it werent ludicrously volatile and wasteful. But I have no idea if those problems could really ever be solved, or any progress has been made on those fronts
Proof of Stake and Proof of Work are two different ways of electing who should append the blockchain with new transactions.
Proof of Work: the one who can waste most energy fastest is most likely to be elected.
Proof of Stake: the one with most money is most likely to be elected.
It’s a bit oversimplified, but that’s the general idea.
Proof of Stake: the one with most money is most likely to be elected.
This is misleading. Winning the validation election doesn’t give you more power.
The one who is most dishonest gets their stake burned.
Yes, Ethereum has been using PoS successfully for over three years and they’re not the only major blockchain to do so. PoS works great these days, still using PoW in 2026 is a deliberate choice.
Don’t think crypto is the solution to replacing payment processors. The distributed networks is going to have enormous difficulty scaling to even a fraction of the number of card payments processed each day.
IMO xmr kinda saved proof of work by optimising their algo for consumer grade CPUs.
CPU mining is much less econimcal than GPU because you can’t fit as many CPUs on a single system. Plus server grade CPUs with lots of smol cores instead of a few big ones hurts it too.
Makes it hard for anyone other than nerds with am extra PC to make money mining, and most of those guys won’t be purposely picking a geographic location with the cheapest/most environmentally harmful electricity source. (More nerds live off of nuclear/solar than datacenters full of miners do)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum#Transition_to_proof-of-stake
I know Etherum made the switch, but I don’t really know about the rest of the ecosystem.
Also since we’re throwing questions around for those who don’t follow the developments anymore:
- Did larger blocks ever become popular, since the BTC, BCH split?
- Did the lightning payment network ever become popular?
And banks could continue having a monopoly on controlling money and transactions.
I really don’t care about the legal form the oligarchs give themselves, but at least the state can impose statutory requirements on banks, even if they’ve always been too lax.
Oh, for a moment I thought he was talking about AI.
AI is worse.
yes I told my self that also, would love reading recent datas and charts about ia consumption
Eh, at least Ai produces something.
No it doesn’t
Wayyy more than crypto currency. There are definitely arguments to be made about how much value llms create and whether or not they are good for our society long-term. What’s hard to argue is that they produce less value than crypto which at best fails to deliver on their goals of divesting from banking institutions (financial institutions and government agencies currently hold the largest stakes) and at worst serve as an ideal platform for criminal enterprises and political bribery.
I think the technology itself has great potential, though capitalism using it for the worst reasons imaginable and making it as inefficient as physically possible will never show us the true potential of this technology.
Under different social structures, it could possibly be a pretty great foundation for new kinds of monetary systems
It is inherently less useful than cash and basic electronic monetary transactions.
Progress is measured by what something does rather than why it could do.
Some ideas aren’t applied everywhere or at all (e.g equal rights for women in Afghanistan). Does it mean discussing them in those places is useless ?
Are you comparing human rights to speculative assets?
I’m talking about technological progress only.
Well the fact that you call them speculative assets is part of the problem. Bitcoin wasn’t invented to be this, but as an alternative to centralized banking after the Subprimes crash of 2008. The creators’ intentention was very diffirent
But you’re right, I should’n be comparing it to human rights. As a simpler example: the fediverse has huge potential but it’s disregarded virtually everywhere or simply unknown to the vast majority of people. I see it as progress nontheless.
Much of historical research was seemingly useless for a very long time until some progress in unrelated fields enabled them to suddenly become very useful. I prefer to be open minded about technology, not tying it to the way its used by the current time and political system we are living in
So far, crypto is a massively wasteful endeavor. It wastes extreme amounts of power while also hoarding computer hardware.
It’s a speculative asset which cannot be used for as money. It only has value as long as hype exists.
